Charity Case

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE She screamed and began twisting and clawing the way I knew she would as soon as I said it. But she stopped, stunned, as if I'd slapped her out of hysterics, only I'd never let go of her shoulders. She hung then, her face empty, repeating, "What? What? " Finally she began laughing and she pulled away from me so gently and naturally that I had to let go. She sank down and sat on top of my money on the little bookcase. She laughed some more into her two open hands. I stood there, not knowing what to do with myself. She looked up at me and brushed away a few tears with her fingertips. " You want to get me off of your conscience, do you, William Hagle? God, that's a good one." She reached out and took my hand in hers. "Come along down into the basement, William. I want to show you something. Afterward, if you want to—if you really want to—you may kill me." "Thanks," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say. Down in the basement, the machinery looked complex, with all sorts of thermostats and speedometers. "Automatic stoker?" I asked. "Time machine," she said. "You don't mean a time machine like H. G. Wells's," I said, to show her I wasn't ignorant. "Not exactly like that, but close," she answered sadly. "This has been the cause of all your trouble, William." "It has?" "Yes. This house and the ground around it are the Primary Focus area for the Hexers. The Hexers have tormented and persecuted you all your life. They got you into trouble. They made you think you were going crazy—" "I never thought I was going crazy!" I yelled at her. "That must have made it worse," she said miserably. I thought about it. "I suppose it did. What are the Hexers? What—for the sake of argument—have they got against me?" "The Hexers aren't human. I suppose they are extraterrestrials. No one ever told me. Maybe they are a kind of human strain that went different. I don't really know. They want different things than we do, but they can buy some of them with money, so they can be hired. People in the future hire them to hex people in the past." "Why would anybody up ahead there with Buck Rogers want to cause me trouble? I'm dead then, aren't I?" "Yes, you must be. It's a long time into the future. But, you see, some of my relatives there want to punish you for—it must be for killing Father. They lost out on a chain of inheritance because he died when he did. They have money now, but they are bitter because they had to make it themselves. They can afford every luxury—even the luxury of revenge." I suppose when you keep seeing monsters and hearing yourself say things you didn't say, you can believe unusual things easier. I believed Miss Tompkins. "It was not murder," I said. "I killed him by accident." "No matter. They would hex you if you had hit him with a car in a fog or given him the flu by sneezing in his face. I understand people are hexed all the time for things they never even knew they did. People up there have a lot of leisure, a lot of time to indulge their every irritation or hate. I think it must be decadent, the way Rome was." "What do you—and the machine—have to do with my hex?" I asked. "This is the Primary Focus area, I told you. It's how the Hexers get into this time hypothesis. They can't get back into this Primary itself, but they can come and go through the outer boundary. It's hard to set up a Primary Focus—takes a tremendous drain of power. They broke through into the basement of the old house before I was born and Daddy was the first custodian of the machine. He never knew that he was helping avenge his own death. They let that slip later, after—it happened." "Why did they come to you? Why did you help them?" She turned half away. "The custodian is well paid. My relatives preferred the salary to go to someone in the family, instead of an outsider. Daddy accepted the offer and I've carried on the job." "Paid? You were paid?" She brushed at her eyes. "Oh, not in United States currency. But—Daddy got to be president of the store. It was set up so he could make a fortune that they could inherit. All he left was his insurance, and that went to mother. She died a few months later and some of it went to me and the rest to her relatives." "You mean my life has been like it has because some descendants of yours in the future hate me for an accident that deprived them of some money?" She nodded enthusiastically. "You understand! And because I helped the Hexers they hired get to you. I was afraid you wouldn't believe me. Now"—she stopped to exhale—"do you want to kill me?" "No, I don't want to kill you." I walked over and squinted at the machine. "Could I get into the future with this thing?" "I don't know how you work the outer boundary. I think you need something else. There's an internal energy contact—you can talk to Communications." She raced through that. "You want to kill them , don't you? The Hexers and my relatives?" "I don't want to kill anybody," I told her patiently. "I feel dirty just hearing how far some people can go for revenge. I just want them to let me alone. Why don't they kill me and get it over with?" "They haven't a license to kill. Not yet. There's legislation going on." "Listen," I said, listening to the idea coming into my head, " listen . These descendants of your mother's relatives—they did inherit money because your father died. Maybe they feel grateful to me. Maybe they would help me. Would you help me try to talk to them?" "Yes," Miss Tompkins said, and she used a dial on the machine. It was as simple as putting through a phone call. "We really understand your situation," Mr. Grimes-Tompkins said. "But it would take quite a bit to buy off the Hexers. However, we certainly appreciate the killing you made for us." "Couldn't you buy off the Hexers, then, with some of the money I brought to your side of the family?" I asked. "We don't appreciate it that much." "What? You aren't going to pay him back for killing my father?" Miss Tompkins cried, outraged. "Look," I said, "if you had some money of mine, would you pay off the Hexers for me? You do still use money up there, don't you?" "We certainly do, young man. Just what did you have in mind?" "If I gave you authorization now to use any assets I have in your time, would it be legal?" "Declarations by temporal transmission? Yes, of course. Routine transaction." "Take any money I have and use it to pay off the Hexers. Will you do it?" "I don't see why not, since our ancestor seems to approve." Miss Tompkins regarded me solemnly. "What do you intend to do, William?" "Banks are out," I said, thinking hard. "They don't let inactive accounts go on drawing interest more than twenty years, or something like that. But government bonds don't have to be converted when they mature. One bond can pile up a fantastic amount of interest for them to collect." "You have government bonds, William?" "Not yet." Miss Tompkins stood close to me. "I have plenty of money, William. I'll give it to you. You can buy bonds in my name." "No. I'll get my own money." "Shall I destroy the machine, William? Of course they'll only open another Focus—" "No, you would just get yourself hexed too." "What can I do, William?" she asked. "All along, ever since I was a little girl, I've known I've been helping to torture somebody. I didn't even know your name, William, but I helped torture you—" "Because I killed your father." "—and I've got to make it up to you. I'll give you everything, William, everything." "Sure," I said, "to take me off your conscience. And if I take your offer and you get hexed, what happens to my conscience? Do we go around again—me working my tail off to raise the dough to get you unhexed, and you buying the Hexers off me? Where would it stop? We're even right now. Let's let it go at that." "But, William, if we've taken, now we can give to each other." She looked almost pretty then, and I wanted her the way I'd always wanted women. But I knew better. She wasn't going to get me into any trouble. "No, thanks. Good-by." I walked away from her. For the first time, I could see what my life would be like if I wasn't hexed. Now I could realize that I knew how to do things right if I was only let alone. The intern took the blood smear. He reeled off a long string of questions about diseases I wasn't allowed to have. "No," I said, "and I haven't given blood in the last thirty days." He took my sample of blood and left. I had to have eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents. They paid you twenty dollars a pint for blood here. One government bond held for centuries would pile up a fortune in interest. The smallest bond you can buy is twenty-five dollars face value, and it costs eighteen seventy-five. If I had kept that twenty, I would have had a buck and a quarter change. But if I hadn't have gotten cleaned up, the hospital might not have accepted me as a donor at all. They had had some bad experiences from old bums dying from giving too often. I only hoped I could force myself to let that bond go uncashed through the rest of my life. The intern returned, his small mustache now pointing down. "Mr. Hagle, I have some bad news for you. Very bad. I hardly know how to tell you, but—you've got lukemia." I nodded. "That means you won't take my blood." Maybe it also meant that I would never be allowed to have eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents in one lump again as long as I lived. "No," the intern finally managed. "We can't accept your blood—" I waved him off. "Isn't there some fund to take care of lukemia victims? Feed them, house them, send them to Florida to soak up the sun?" "Certainly there is such a fund, and you may apply, Mr. Hagle." "I'd certainly benefit a lot from that fund. Doctor, humor me. Test me again and see if I still have lukemia." He did. I didn't. "I don't understand this," the intern said, looking frightened. "Transitory lukemia? It must be a lab error." "Will you buy my blood now?" "I'm afraid as long as there is some doubt—this must be something new." "I suppose it is," I told him. "I have all sorts of interesting symptoms." "You do?" The intern was vitally interested. "Feel free to tell me all about them." "I see and hear things." "Really?" "Do you believe in ESP?" "I've sometimes wondered." "Test me as much as you like. You'll find that in any game of chance, I score consistently far below the level of wins I should get by the law of averages. I'm psionically subnormal. And that's just the beginning." "This must be really new," the intern said, eyes shining. "It is," I assured him. "And listen, Doctor, you don't want to turn something like me over to your superiors, to leave me to the mercies of the A.M.A. This can be big, Doctor, big ." They offered Hagle's Disease to a lot of comedians, but finally it was the new guy, Biff Kelsey, that got it and made it his own. He did a thirty-hour telethon for Hagle's Disease. Things really started to roll then. Boston coughed up three hundred thousand alone. The most touching contribution came from Carrville. I plugged away on the employ-the-physically-handicapped theme and was made president of the Foundation for the Treatment of Hagle's Disease. Dr. Wise (the intern) was the director. So far, I had been living soft at Cedars, but I hadn't got my hands on one red cent. I wanted to get that government bond to buy off the Hexers, but at the same time it no longer seemed so urgent. They seemed to have given up, and were just sitting back waiting for their bribe. One morning three months later, Doc Wise came worriedly into my room at the hospital. "I don't like these reports, William," he said. "They all say there's nothing wrong with you." "It comes and it goes," I said casually. "You saw some of the times when it came." "Yes, but I'm having trouble convincing the trustees you weren't malingering. And, contrary to our expectations, no one else in the country seems to have developed Hagle's Disease." "Stop worrying, Doc. Read the Foundation's charter. You have to treat Hagle's Disease, which means you can use that money to treat any disease of mine while we draw our salaries. I must have something wrong with me." Wise shook his head. "Nothing. Not even dandruff or B.O. You are the healthiest man I have ever examined. It's unnatural ." Six months afterward, I had been walking all night in the park, in the rain. I hadn't had anything to eat recently and I had fever and I began sneezing. The money was still in the bank—no, not in my name—I couldn't touch it; Miss Tompkins' descendants couldn't touch it—just waiting for me to— I started running toward the hospital. I slammed my fists against Wise's door. "Obed up, Wise. Id's be, Hagle. I god a cold. That's a disease, is'd it?" Wise threw back the door. "What did you say?" "I said 'Open up, Wise. It's me, Hagle. I've got a cold'.... Never mind, Wise, never mind." But you don't want to hear about all that. You want to know about what happened in the relief office. There's not much to tell. I picked up the check from the guy's desk and looked at it. Nine fifty-seven to buy food for two weeks. I griped that it wasn't enough—not enough to keep alive on and save eighteen seventy-five clear in a lifetime. The slob at the desk said, "What have you got to complain about? You got your health, don't you?" That's when I slugged him and smashed up the relief office, and that's why the four cops dragged me here, and that's why I'm lying here on your couch telling you this story, Dr. Schultz. I had my health, sure, but I finally figured out why. If you believe any of this, you're thinking that the Hexers must have laid off me, which is why I'm healthy. I thought so too, but how would that add up? Look, I tried every way I could to raise eighteen seventy-five to buy a government bond. I never made it I never made it because I wasn't allowed to. But I didn't know it because I'd been euchred into the Foundation for the Treatment of Hagle's Disease. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, all earmarked for one purpose only—treating my disease—and I haven't got any! Or maybe you're figuring the way I did, that senility is a disease, and all I have to do is wait for it to creep up on me so I can get some of that Foundation money. But the Hexers have that fixed too, I'll bet. I'm not sure, but I think I'm going to live for centuries without a sick day in my life. In other words, I'm going to live that life out as poor as I am right now! It's a fantastic story, Doctor, but you believe me, don't you? You do believe every word of it. You have to, Doctor! Because a persecution complex is kind of a disease and I'd have to be treated for it. Now will you let me out of this jacket so I can smoke a cigarette? *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARITY CASE *** Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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